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Open Pawn Project: Something new under the sun

As many as three-quarters of all Linux desktop systems use KDE as their primary desktop. While the GNOME desktop has made great strides over the last few years, KDE is clearly the more stable and mature choice for business users.

These two desktop environments are not mutually exclusive. All GNOME applets work in KDE and vice versa. Most distributions install both environments by default. So you have the luxury of picking a different one every day, and tweak them till you're happy. Of course, you won't get any work done in the process!

But what they both have in common is that they offer nothing new. The graphic desktop have been around since XEROX invented it. And nearly nothing has happen since that time. Several people in the Linux community say that they don't want to have another Windows look a like desktop, while some say they will.

In 2003 a new little project started. The goal of the project was to change the desktop forever. One of the goals was to make the computer follow orders in a natural language way. A thing that has only been visible in sci-fi movies. Another goal was to trash the filesystem. The user should not have to worry what a previous filename was or in what folder it did belong to.

Today the project has changed name to the Open Pawn Project and has reached the release number of 0.3. The project does have a long way to go until it will be mature enought to compete for real on the desktop. But nearly everything in the Pawn is new. imagine the following:

If you work in Pawn you don't need to:
* know how to accomplish a task.
* know how a computer works.
* know what program to use.
* No need to know the name of the file

That means that anyone can work on a computer whith zero knowledge. Microsoft/KDE/GNOME does not even come close to this. The next Microsoft OS, Longhorn, has even removed one of the most wanted features" 'the searchable filesystem', a feature that is already implemented in v0.2 of Pawn.

Some small companys and non-profit organisations have promised support for the Pawn desktop system, because it is unique, fantastic and most of all new. But Pawn can never be something really big whithout the Open Source Community support.